


Daughter of Gallifrey

by aadarshinah



Series: The Doctor and The Spinner [3]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Wolf Rose Tyler, Episode: s01e14 The Christmas Invasion, F/M, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Time Lord Rose Tyler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:16:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aadarshinah/pseuds/aadarshinah
Summary: Regeneration's complicated but not nearly as complicated as dealing with Jackie Tyler."The Christmas Invasion" sequel to "The Spinner" and "Reborn".





	Daughter of Gallifrey

**Author's Note:**

> This is the last for the night. Hopefully, if my muse agrees, it is not the last forever. I'd like to make it to end of The Doctor's regeneration cycle and the aftermath, which should be at least one more installment... But, alas, I have work in the morning and my muse has never been comfortable spending the night, so we'll see how it goes.

The TARDIS screams as she crashes into the unknown. Or, rather, into the bins outside the Powell Estate sometime in the early twenty-first century. Rose can tell that much now they've landed, though her head is pounding too much for her to get a better reading than that. She hopes it's sometime after she started traveling with The Doctor, otherwise this might be a bit much to explain to Mum.

Oh, Mum.

Not her mother, certainly - not genetically at least. She knows precisely who her genetic donors were and she might actually _thank_ The Doctor for killing them at the end of The Time War for forcing her to Loom Nightmares and Travesties for the Could-have-been King's armies. The War made monsters of them all, but the things that called themselves her parents had walked gladly down that path and dragged the rest of the universe with them.

But Mum - Mum had raised her. Something inside her had to have known that Rose wasn't really her daughter, just a story created by the Perversion Forge, but she'd still done the best she could to raise Rose and treat her as her own. Plenty of girls on estates didn't turn out half so well as she had. Plenty of Time Lords didn't either. It takes love to raise a child, whatever the species, and Mum loved her. Mum loved her so much that the words to describe it had been stripped from the Gallifreyan language long before the Looms came about.

Rose tries to get to her feet, but the pounding in her head just gets worse, so she crawls across the stupidly hard coral floor towards The Doctor - not close enough to touch, but enough to see that he's breathing. There's still regeneration energy slipping out from behind his closed eyes, but he still looks the same as he did immediately after the process began to settle, so it must just be internal changes. If they've any luck at all, it's just rewriting the same gene sequence over and over again - something small and innocuous, like lactose tolerance, and not something important, like the number of hearts.

"Should've called you Trouble all those years ago. Better than that nonsense Koschei came up with." She leans back against the console and closes her eyes. "I don't suppose you could give me any idea when we are, Old Girl?"

The TARDIS doesn't answer. As if to be contrary, the pounding in her head gets worse.

No, wait, that's not in her head.

Rose scrambles to her feet and stumbled her way to the doors. “Mum! Mickey! Perfect timing. I could use a hand. And also the date. And maybe the year? When did you see me last? We kind of crash-landed and I don’t know if The Doctor was with it enough to avoid crossing our own timeline before he keeled over.”

She turns and smiles back at him fondly. “He failed his piloting test, you know. Stole this Old Girl. The stuffed shirts in funny hats said he’d never amount to anything and look at him. He’s saved the world so many times - died to save us all so many times.”

She feels tears threatening to spill over again. “I’m glad they’re dead. I’m glad he killed them.” She dashes her eyes. “Help me get him inside yeah?”

* * *

“Alright then, what’s going on?" Mum demands after they've got him on the bed, "Who’s this? And why couldn’t you help us lug him up all those steps? He's a heavy thing for nothing but skin and bones.”

“I told you, it’s The Doctor.” She's said this at least a dozen times now. It's already gotten old.

“How can he go changing his face? Is that a different face or is he a different person? ”

“A little bit of both really. Everything physical changes, but personality's a bit different. Some of it's based on brain chemistry and shape so, yeah, that changes. But the nurture bit? That's stronger. The core of who he is never changing. No matter what face he wears, he's still my Doctor."

Mum frowns. "He does this a lot then, your Doctor?"

"Not exactly. It's a Time Lord thing. We call it regeneration-"

Rose recognizes her slip the moment she makes it, but so does Mum, no matter how hard she tries to grab ahold of the timeline and yank it backward. It never worked as a kid, but maybe if she tries hard enough she can rewind time. Just a few seconds, that's all she needs.

" _We_? What's this _we_ business? He did something to you, didn't he? What did I tell you, he puts on an innocent act, that one, whatever face he's wearing, but when it comes down to it it's just a sick old man kidnapping young girls-"

She doesn't feel her hand moving until she sees the red mark on Mum's face. Rose looks down at her hand in horror. "Mum, I-"

"You slapped me."

"I'm so sorry, I don't mean to-"

"You slapped me," Mum repeated, looking at her like she's some strange sideshow exhibit, terrible and pitiable and utterly beyond belief. "I don't know who you are anymore, Rose. Traveling I could understand. Girl from the estates shacking up with an alien in order to see the universe, I might not like it, I might want more for you than that, but I could understand it. But men changing faces? And you just standing there, talking like it's normal, talking like you're one of them - and slapping me. Me! Your mum, whose only ever wanted the best for you. I don't know who you are anymore, Rose. But it's not my daughter."

It would be easier if Mum stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. But no, she just walks, walks like Rose's world isn't burning to ashes around her, and shuts the door so quietly she doesn't hear it click.

Rose tries, she really does. She's a Time Lord, a Daughter of Gallifrey. She's supposed to be above this. She's already cried more today than The Spinner had in her whole first incarnation, but she can't help it. She's sobbing before she can stop herself, and she can't even throw herself onto the bed and cling to The Doctor like she used to when she was a little girl with night black hair and only decades to her name because it might rip a hole in the size of Liechtenstein in space-time. So she sinks into the chair in the corner, pulls her knees up to her chest, and cries. Cries for Jack Harkness and Gallifrey and all the beautiful children she Loomed and lost and all the incarnations of her Doctor she never knew and Mum and the life that can no longer be. 

* * *

Forty-three minutes later, the door opens. "I heard what happened," Mickey says, concerned but free of judgement. "I brought tea."

"Thank you," she tells him before hurriedly wiping her face on her sleeve. "I must look a state."

"You look beautiful," and oh, Rose can remember why she loved him once. Mickey is a good man - not the best or the brightest or the bravest, but he's good at heart, and that counts for a lot. There are a lot of great men in the universe, but very few good ones. "Want to talk about it?"

"The Doctor, the last Doctor, died to save me and she's still ready to call the police on him like he's some sort of pervert. You'd think she'd realize by now he's not about sneaking into little girls' bedrooms and stealing their knickers or anything."

Micky laughs. "I reckon she thinks it's a mite more than that, mate."

"It shouldn't matter if I'm shagging him every night and twice on Sundays, she's seen what he does, what he helps other people to do. If she can't understand that it's about more than spaceships and traveling and who I chose to snog, that's her own lookout."

"You're her daughter, Rose. In her mind, nobody's ever going to be good enough for you, especially not some alien with two hearts and two of who knows what else."

"I'm not, you know," she says and closes her eyes, searching for the memory.

_The Time War raged across time and space. Whole civilizations were destroyed before their founders could place the first bricks; planets crumbled to dust before they were ever formed. The Nightmare Child raced across the skies, swallowing realities like candies, leaving Skaro Degradations writhing in his wake, desecrating the possibilities that survived until only a handful of timelines remained._

_Arcadia had not yet fallen. The defenses of the Seven Systems had not yet been breached, but oh! So many had fallen. So many races damned never-to-be before they had drawn their first breaths._

_And the children - her beautiful children! - forced to become Nightmares and Travesties before they even left the Loom, dying by the dozens every second of every hour of every decade, until The Spinner had birthed more dead than living. Even those few who were allowed to grow unperverted were still thrust, eight-years-old, in front of the Untempered Schism to break or flee or grow mad instead. None of her children were allowed to live._

_She couldn't stop them. She couldn't save them. She couldn't even protect them from the monsters in stuffed shirts and funny hats that called themselves_ her _parents and demanded she twist their genes more and more to feed their war machine._

_So she tore out everything that made her The Spinner. She smothered her hopes and futures and dreams upon the altar of the Perversion Forge expecting to die, and instead found herself changed. Soft and pink and yellow and small on a strange, primitive world with the memories of a child three weeks dead in her head instead of her own..._

_Jackie Tyler had had a daughter for twelve years until a careless driver took that child's life just as it had taken her husband's all those years before. For three weeks she had cried and begged and raged against the heavens, and then, on Christmas, a miracle she didn't know was a miracle, to replace the child she didn't remember she had lost, a Time Lord who had chosen to forget she was a Time Lord, bearing the name of the living gold roses that wouldn't be grown in The Tiered Gardens of The Hidden Emperor for two thousand years._

_Arkytior._

_Rose._

"What was that?"

"Nothing," Rose says quickly, dabbing her eyes again. "Mind giving him some of that?" She gestures at the cuppa still in his hands. "Superheated infusion of free radicals and tannin, should sort out his synapses."

"Whatever you say, mate. Mind giving me a hand?"

"Can't-," she tries to explain before Mum bursts into the room and shouts-

"The Christmas tree is trying to kill me!"

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all my lovely reviewers so far and to all that are to come. I apologize for any grammatical and/or glaring canonical errors, as I am posting as I go.


End file.
